The Cider Press We Carried Home

“Next weekend, Augie,” my brother-in-law said, loud enough that I could hear him through the phone from across Dad’s kitchen. “I’ll bring it out next weekend. Things are just crazy here right now.”

Dad said, “All right, Darwin,” the way he says it to the weatherman on the radio, and hung the phone back on the wall. Then he stood there with his hand still on it.

That was the first Sunday of October, the third October in a row I had heard that exact phone call. Same words. Same “crazy.” Same next weekend that never once came.

My father is Augie Kimmel. He is 86 years old, a widower, and he grew apples on forty acres outside Coloma, Michigan, for most of his working life. The trees he has left are the old ones by the house.

“Well,” he said, and he took his cap off the hook by the door and went out to look at the yard. I watched him through the window over the sink. He walked straight to the bare patch of grass under the Northern Spy trees and stood there.

That bare patch is where the press goes. It has gone there every October since 1920, when Dad’s father paid for it with a wagonload of apples and a promise to press for the whole road.

I am Rosella. I am 50 years old, and I fix school buses for the county district. I have changed brake chambers in a freezing barn at five in the morning. I am not a woman who cries in kitchens.

I stood at that sink with Dad’s coffee cups in the water and felt my eyes go hot anyway, because I knew exactly what he was looking at, and I knew he would never say one word about it out loud.

The press is not anything fancy to look at, unless you know what you are looking at. It is red-painted oak and cast iron, a grinder on top with a hopper and a big flywheel, and a slatted tub below with an iron screw coming down from a crossbar.

You dump apples in the hopper. Somebody turns the flywheel crank, and the grinder chews them into pomace that falls into the tub. Then you crank the screw down on the pomace and the cider runs out the spout at the bottom.

That is all it is. But every October of my life, the whole road came to Dad’s yard with bushel baskets and empty jugs, and Dad and Mom pressed for everybody, and nobody paid a dime. That was the promise Grandpa made, and Dad kept it like a church vow.

Mom ran the jugs. She had them washed and lined up on the porch boards a week ahead, and she stood at the spout with her steel bucket and her hair tied up in a scarf. She has been gone eight years now.

The press kept going after Mom died. Dad pressed alone the first year, with me cranking, and the neighbors came the same as always. Nobody said anything about the empty spot by the spout. They just brought pie.

Then, three years ago in September, Dad had his left hip replaced at the hospital in St. Joseph. It went fine, but he was on a walker for six weeks and could not stand at a press, let alone crank one.

That was when Darwin called and asked to borrow it.